This is Kodak’s new plan to stay afloat

With film cameras the domain of a select few and the digital camera realm owned by rival companies, Rochester-based camera icon Kodak is reaching into its past to try to find ways to branch out.

The company is looking to old patents to find new ways to extend its life span, the New York Times reports.

From The Times:

“I’m mining the history of this company for its underlying technologies,” said Jeff Clarke, 53, who became Kodak’s chief executive last year. Mr. Clarke has no delusions that Kodak could bring those technologies to market on its own; it will need corporate partners to make actual products. “We’ll never be able to prosecute the value of our intellectual property with Kodak-branded sales,” he said in an office in the same tower where George Eastman once looked out on his global tech empire.

What happens after a tech company is left for dead but the people left behind refuse to give up the fight? At Kodak the answer is to dig deep into a legacy of innovation in the photography business and see if its remaining talent in optics and chemistry can be turned into new money in other industries.

Kodak has around $2 billion in annual sales today; in 1990, it was $19 billion. Its work force has been cut from a high of 145,000 to just 8,000, downsizing that has been deeply felt in the company’s home town of Rochester, New York.

The report by the Motion Picture Association of America found that 64% of people who saw the toy-inspired movie in theaters were white, 16% were Hispanic, 12% were African-American and 8% identified as Asian and other. Transformers: The Age of Extinction notched the most diverse audience among the top-grossing movies, with crowds that were 38% white, 26% Hispanic, 22% African-American and 14% Asian and other, the report found.

Hispanics went to the movies in 2014 at a greater rate than any other ethnic group: Nearly a fourth of all moviegoers in 2014 were Hispanic, although they represent just 17% of the country’s population.

The MPAA said global box office receipts for all films reached $36.4 billion in 2014, for a 1% increase over 2013. Movie attendance in the Asia Pacific region is up 12% and 34% China. Box office receipts dropped in the U.S. and Canada to $10.4 billion, a 5% drop from 2013.

Uber offers free rides to early film screenings

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com.

By Victor Luckerson, TIME

Now there could be a new way to get an early look at hotly anticipated movies: hail an Uber. The taxi app is launching a new partnership with 20th Century Fox to carry Uber riders to special screenings of the upcoming spy movie Kingsman: The Secret Service on Thursday. In 50 cities, Uber users will be able to enter a special promo code between now and Thursday for a chance to win tickets to the early screenings. In 9 cities, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, some winners will also receive complimentary Uber rides to the movie theater and film merchandise. Three grand-prize winners will get a paid vacation to New York to attend a special event for the film on Feb. 9.

Kingsman: The Secret Service doesn’t premiere nationally for another month, so Uber users are getting a pretty advanced look at the latest Colin Firth vehicle.

Sony’s ‘The Interview’ draws moviegoers who trumpet free speech

(REUTERS) – “The Interview,” the Sony Pictures film about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, opened in more than 300 movie theaters across the United States on Christmas Day, drawing many sell-out audiences and statements by patrons that they were championing freedom of expression.

Co-directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, who also co-stars in the low-brow comedy with James Franco, surprised moviegoers by appearing at the sold-out 12:30 a.m. screening of the movie at a theater in Los Angeles, where they briefly thanked fans for their support.

Sony Pictures this week backtracked from its original decision to cancel the release of the $44 million film after major U.S. theater chains pulled out because of threats of violence by Guardians of Peace, a computer hacking group that claimed responsibility for a destructive cyberattack on Sony last month.

The United States blamed the attacks on North Korea.

Movie theater managers and patrons alike said they believed there was nothing to fear, and the initial screenings on Thursday were uneventful.

But one of the online outlets that distributed the film ahead of its theatrical release, Microsoft Corp’s Xbox Live, reported that users were experiencing problems getting connected on Thursday.

A hacking group called the Lizard Squad claimed it was behind disruptions at both Xbox and Sony Corp’s PlayStation Networks, which was not carrying “The Interview.” The group’s claim could not be verified.

Neither Microsoft nor Sony offered explanations for the connectivity problems, though both services expected heavy use as consumers who received the devices for Christmas tried to log on all at once.

Extra network traffic on Xbox from users downloading “The Interview” may also have exacerbated connectivity problems for Microsoft.

The film also was available to U.S. online viewers through Google Inc’s Google Play and YouTube Movie, as well as on a Sony website, http://www.seetheinterview.com. It can be seen in Canada on the Sony site and Google Canada’s website.

A Sony spokeswoman on Thursday said she had no figures on the number of downloads so far, and the studio was not expected to have box office numbers from theaters before Friday morning.

The audience at the first screening of the film in New York City, at the Cinema Village in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, remained silent during a scene showing the death of Kim Jong Un in the downing of his helicopter.

Matt Rosenzweig, 60, of Manhattan, said the moments that drew the most applause had to do with the idea of acting against censorship rather than animosity toward North Korea.

RAUCOUS APPLAUSE

Although Cinema Village manager Lee Peterson said the New York Police Department planned to post officers outside the theater, there was no visible police presence outside or inside the venue for the first screening.

An afternoon screening at the Van Nuys Regency Theaters in the city’s San Fernando Valley was two-thirds full and drew a diverse crowd ranging from teens to senior citizens, who laughed loudly throughout at Rogen and Franco’s antics.

“It was much better than I thought it would be,” said Carlos Royal, 45, a professor who came with a friend dressed in Santa hats and took selfies for the occasion in front of the theater’s Hollywood sign marquis. “I wanted to support the U.S.”

The movie, which is playing in theaters in major metropolitan areas as well as in smaller cities ranging from Bangor,Maine, to Jasper, Indiana, features Rogen and Franco as journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader.

Sony decided to release the film after U.S. President Barack Obama, as well as such Hollywood luminaries asGeorge Clooney and Republicans and Democrats in Washington, raised concerns that Hollywood was setting a precedent of self-censorship.

The audience in Manhattan exited the theater to a throng of network TV cameras and a crowd of people lined up for the next showing.

“It was more serious, the satire, than I was expecting,” said Simone Reynolds, who saw the film while visiting fromLondon. “There’s a message for America in there too about America’s foreign policy.”

North Korea has called the film an “act of war.”

Most fans simply called “The Interview” a funny movie.

Ken Jacowitz, a 54-year-old librarian from the New York borough of Queens, called it “a funny film made by funny people.” He had a message for North Korea and the hackers: “You have given this movie whole new lives.”

Sony cancels ‘The Interview’ after threats

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Alex Fitzpatrick, TIME

Sony Pictures Entertainment cancelled the planned Christmas Day release of The Interview on Wednesday after an unknown person or group threatened to attack theaters that played the film. Sony’s decision comes after several major theater chains backed out of showing the film in light of the threats.

“We are deeply saddened by this brazen effort to suppress the distribution of a movie, and in the process do damage to our company, our employees and the American public,” Sony said in a statement. “We stand by our filmmakers and their right to free expression and are extremely disappointed by this outcome.”

The threats, which warned of 9/11-style attacks against theaters showing The Interview, may have come from the same people responsible for hacking Sony Pictures late last month. Thousands of Sony employees’ emails and personal data have been posted online as a result of the hack, and Sony is still reeling from its effects.

It isn’t yet clear who hacked Sony or threatened the theaters, though some analysts have pointed fingers at North Korea. Pyongyang is furious over The Interview, a comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco about TV journalists asked to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. But no clear link to North Korea has been established, and the government has denied responsibility for the hack.

Movie theaters should jack up prices on Thanksgiving weekend, but they won’t

Retailers aren’t the only ones preparing for a rush of business this holiday season. The Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays are a busy time for the movie business too, with average weekly attendance over Thanksgiving weekend spiking, followed by an even more pronounced surge in attendance during Christmas.

But unlike, say, the airline industry, movie theaters don’t take advantage of this surge in demand by charging its customers more. A 2007 paper published by Barak Orbach and Liran Einav argues that “anecdotal evidence indeed indicates that variable pricing could increase revenues” for theaters. They point to studies conducted in the 1970s showed that lowering prices during weekdays increased box office revenues and concession sales. Theater owners overseas have also had success by discounting tickets during slow periods or charging premiums for big blockbuster movies like Jurassic Park.

But despite this evidence, and the sound economic theory that supports changing prices to reflect waxing and waning demand, theaters in America more or less charge the same price for a ticket regardless of the how popular the movie is or when it is playing.

Orbach and Einav explain that this wasn’t always the case. There was widespread use of variable pricing in the industry from the 1910s until the 1950s, and the practice continued in some theaters up until the early 1970s. According to Orbach and Einav, film distributors, which often owned major stakes in the most popular movie theaters, devised a system in which everyone benefitted from variable pricing:

Theaters were classified according to their affiliation, luxuriousness, age, and location. Based on this classification, a “run-clearance-zone” system was established. In any defined geographic location, a given movie played at one theater, and another theater within the same zone could show the same movie only after a defined period lapsed.

Distributors also graded movies as A, B, or C depending on their budgets and the popularity of leading actors. Admission prices for A movies were greater than B, while B movies cost more than the C variety. These practices created a system where ticket prices varied depending on when and where movies played and how much it cost to make them.

This system began to unravel in the late 1940s, when a recession and the advent of television dealt a huge blow to the movie production industry. “Adjusted to 2002 dollars, box office receipts, which hit a record of $15.6 billion in 1946, bottomed out at just $5.5 billion in 1964, and then gradually climbed to $9.5 billion in 2002,” write Orbach and Einav. The business reacted to this sea change by cutting back on the supply of movies—mostly by eliminating lower-priced B and C movies. In addition, the famous Paramount anti-trust case of 1948 broke up the system that gave movie distributors an interest in the variable pricing scheme.

That case was supposed to dismantle the cozy relationship between movie theaters and distributors, but even today “most theaters are informally affiliated with specific major distributors,” write Orbach and Einav. They find that the Paramount case and state laws aimed at “creating a competitive bidding market in which theaters have access to all distributors” have failed. And the benefits of the system that eventually emerged accrued to movie studios and distributors, rather than the theaters themselves. Theaters make most of their profits from concessions and would benefit from a pricing scheme that kept their houses full no matter the time of day or year.

The reliance on uniform pricing has had some unintended ethical consequences, too. For instance, this weekend, TheNew York Times ethicist column dealt with a reader who liked purchasing (at a movie theater with reserved seating) an extra seat next to him so that he could enjoy the additional space. The ethicist frowned on this practice, writing:

If you buy an extra ticket for a movie playing in a theater that’s only half full, you’re actually being more morally conscientious than necessary. Most of the time, finding an empty third seat is not that difficult — but by paying for a third ticket, you are admitting your intentions up front and ensuring that you won’t extract more from this experience than you invested. That’s good citizenship. If the theater is full, however, you should never do this…. You are placing your own gratuitous comfort … above a stranger’s ability to merely experience the same film. Under those conditions, the benefit you are taking for yourself is smaller and less meaningful than what you’re taking away from another person. That’s bad citizenship.

An economist would look at this question differently. He would argue that it’s impossible for an outsider to say one movie goer’s comfort is less valuable than a stranger’s ability to merely experience the film. What if, for instance, a movie goer is so anthrophobic that he can’t enjoy a movie without a buffer seat next to him?

Furthermore, the ethicist argues that it’s actually an example of good citizenship to buy an extra seat, but only when the movie isn’t sold out. But in most situations, a movie goer won’t likely know whether a movie will sell out when he is buying his tickets, especially if he buys his tickets well ahead of the showing. By raising prices during times of high demand and lowering them during times of slack demand, theaters would make it less likely for a patron to buy extra comfort in the form of extra seats.

Prices can communicate of all sorts of information, but only when they are allowed to change in the face of shifting supply and demand.

4 new ways movie theaters are filling seats and upselling patrons

This post is in partnership with Money. The article below was originally published at Money.com

Brad Tuttle, MONEY

Even with the blizzard of ticket sales for Frozen starting the year, 2014 has been less than stellar at the box office, with a summer of few blockbusters and overall sales that are down 4% compared to last year. In previous years, theaters and movie studios have resorted to raising admission prices (often using IMAX or 3D screenings as a justification) as a way to offset declining ticket sales.

However, fewer 3D films are being released lately—at least partly because theatergoers have come to see the technology as a gimmick not worth paying extra for in an otherwise mediocre movie—so theaters and movie studios have had to become more creative in their efforts to fill seats and upsell patrons. Here are a few of the strategies that have popped up recently:

Unlimited Admission Ticket
AMC Theatres and Paramount Pictures are experimenting right now with a special unlimited admission for Christopher Nolan’s three-hour space epic Interstellar that’ll get customers to turn over an extra $15. Like it sounds, the unlimited admission ticket allows filmgoers to see the movie as many times as they like—which could be quite a few times, considering how confusing some have found it to be. Unlimited tickets are on sale for $19.99 to $34.99, depending on location, or customers can pay $14.99 to upgrade a one-time admission into an unlimited one.

Combo Concessions
To boost revenues, theater concessions stands have increasingly been offering combo packages that generally include popcorn, a drink in a collectible cup, and often some kind of toy or figurine related to the movie such as How to Train Your Dragon 2 or Transformers: Age of Extinction. The Hollywood Reporter noted these combos cost theaters about $1.50 apiece, and they’re sold to customers for as much as $7.95. As one executive involved in the creation and licensing of such products explained, the natural reaction children have when seeing such combos is to whine until a parent gives in and buys one: “The kid sees another kid with this toy and says, ‘Hey, I want that, too.’” And the popularity of these offers isn’t limited to children, as one theater food service manager said: “We didn’t think we would see 35-year-old guys with collectible cups with little toys on them, but they love them.”

Booze, Food, Recliners… and Wind
To attract more customers and simultaneously squeeze more money out of them at the same time, theaters have been adding or expanding amenities and special features so that going to the movies is much more of an “experience” than sitting at home watching Netflix. Regal Cinemas has been adding luxury recliners to theaters, and plans to have them in as many as 350 locations by 2015. AMC’s Dine-in Theatres program allows patrons at select locations to grab beer and wine, as well as lunch, dinner, or some snacks while taking in a film, sometimes from the comfort of a recliner. In June, the country’s first 4D theater opened in Los Angeles, with artificial wind, fog, scents, and sensor-equipped seats adding another dimension to 3D films.

Gamer Competitions
In October, three Cinemark theaters boasted “multiple sold-out auditoriums” for special screenings that took place in the middle of the night and charged a premium over the usual movie admission. Most curiously, the screening that drew these crowds into the movie theaters wasn’t a movie at all, but a video game competition, the Riot Games League of Legends Championships, which were being held in South Korea and live-streamed at theaters in Texas, Illinois, and Washington.

Movie theaters: Popcorn? Yes. Wearable tech? No

Moviegoers with smart watches, smart glasses or any other kind of “wearable technology” must shut their devices off come showtime, according to the movie industry’s updated anti-piracy policies.

“We maintain a zero-tolerance policy toward using any recording device while movies are being shown,” reads the joint statement from the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Association of Theatre Owners. “As has been our long-standing policy, all phones must be silenced and other recording devices, including wearable devices, must be turned off and put away at show time.”

Individuals caught not following the rules may be asked to leave the theater — or worse.

“If theater managers have indications that illegal recording activity is taking place, they will alert law enforcement authorities when appropriate, who will determine what further action should be taken,” the statement says.

The updated zero-tolerance policy applies to 32,000 movie screens in the U.S. and comes at a time when technology like smartphones make it easier than ever to record and pirate films. It also follows developments in June, when groups like the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, an Austin, Tex.-based theater chain, moved to ban use of Google’s futuristic eyewear, Google Glass, during movies.

The inclusion of wearables on the list of banned products isn’t exactly surprising. Theater owners have been on the lookout for some time. But it does reflect the growing adoption of wearables. It could also make for some uncomfortable conversations between theater security guards and patrons engaging in harmless behavior like merely checking the time on their smartwatches.

Strict as the new policies seem, they pale next to the consequences: Under U.S. law, any movie faces up to three years in prison.

In other words: Shut down your wearable tech. Two hours untethered is nothing compared to time behind bars.

DreamWorks Animation considering a sale to Japan’s SoftBank

DreamWorks Animation, the studio run by film executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, may have unexpectedly found a buyer in Japan’s SoftBank.

SoftBank, the telecommunications company owned by billionaire Masayoshi Son, offered $32 per share for DreamWorks, a 43% premium to the stock’s closing price Friday, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The DreamWorks DWA board held an emergency meeting last week to consider the $3.4 billion bid, though no official decision has yet to be made.

At this stage, SoftBank is only in talks with the animation company. The deal has not been formally considered by senior executives and at this point is unlikely to be finalized, sources told Bloomberg News.

DreamWorks CEO Katzenberg had previously looked for a buyer for the animation studio. His company has struggled at the box-office in recent years, losing money on such offerings as “Mr. Peabody & Sherman,” which required a $57 million write down. To try to cover losses on the film side, Katzenberg has invested heavily in the television business, including purchasing online video network Awesomeness TV.

SoftBank has significant financial stores to afford the purchase, especially after Alibaba Group BABA went public on Sept. 19. The company holds more than 30% of Alibaba’s shares, which have a market value worth more than $70 billion.

DreamWorks recent expansion into China could make the studio more valuable to SoftBank, especially given its close ties to Alibaba.

Katzenberg helped create Oriental DreamWorks in 2012 in partnership with two other Chinese media companies. The China-based studio produces local-language animation and will co-produce “Kung Fu Panda 3″ in partnership with U.S. DreamWorks.

Alibaba has invested in media assets, including China’s largest online video site Youku Tudou, and is developing a streaming service with California-based Lions Gate LGF.

Katzenberg would likely stay on with DreamWorks. Hollywood Reporter says he would stay for five years to head the studio after an acquisition by SoftBank.

California agrees to help keep Hollywood production at home

Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers in California announced Wednesday that they’ve reached a deal to expand California’s film production incentive program to $330 million a year, tripling the expiring program that was limited to $100 million.

The tax-credit provides money to local film and television production, which has been facing competition from other states like New York along with across the border in Canada. In the last 15 years, production has reportedly dropped by half, according to a release from Brown’s office.

The program kicks in for five years beginning during the 2015-2016 fiscal year. Although the amount agreed upon is $330 million, legislators had been pressing for over $400 million, according to The New York Times.

News of the increase in tax incentives, meanwhile, comes just a few weeks after the California Film Commission said that the state had lost $2 billion in four years, according to Reuters.

“This law will make key improvements in our Film and Television Tax Credit Program and put thousands of Californians to work,” Gov. Brown said.

The two California assembly members who introduced the legislation were Democrats Mike Gatto and Raul Bocanegra.

The tax credits will be allotted based on the productions that would create the most jobs and will have the biggest impact on California’s economy. This will replace the current lottery system which Gov. Brown’s office said is a”flawed” and “arbitrary system.”